My American Unhappiness - Softcover

""My American Unhappiness" is a major accomplishment from one of my generation's finest storytellers, a profoundly funny, moving, beautifully detailed, and ultimately hopeful portrait of our country in a certain moment." --Davy Rothbart, founder and editor of "Found"

A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke Pappas is a thirty-three-year-old scholar who asks almost everybody he meets, "Why are you so unhappy?" The answers he receives -- a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint -- become the core of his obsessive project, "The Inventory of American Unhappiness." Zeke, meanwhile, remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his daily routine, opting instead to focus his energy on finding the perfect mate so that he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined in a women's magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some "prospects" a newly divorced neighbor, a coffeehouse barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola ("Why not aim high?").

One of the most charmingly deluded narrators to come along in years, Zeke has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.

Dean Bakopoulos is the author of the novel Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, a New York Times Notable Book, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is on the faculty at Iowa State University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.